Baby Deaths Case : Doctor Finds Varied Crew of Defenders

The irony in the downtown Los Angeles courtroom was palpable as Joseph A. Emory took the witness stand.

Emory, a former osteopath convicted in 1980 in the deaths of infants in his care, was testifying in a March bail hearing on behalf of Dr. Milos Klvana, a Valencia obstetrician accused of murder and involuntary manslaughter in the deaths of babies in his care.

“I knew he was naive,” Emory testified, referring to how he became friends with Klvana. “He was in need of guidance.”

Emory is only one of Klvana’s supporters, a varied group of people with various methods and motives. Some are friends, some are gadflies, and some are former patients who see the case as an attack on home birth. Some supporters believe others should go away because their zealous lobbying of the courts on Klvana’s behalf actually may damage the doctor’s legal defense.

Supporters Vary

Besides Emory, whom investigators nicknamed “Dr. Death,” Klvana’s supporters include Fay Douglas, a longtime Los Angeles County gadfly who regularly has attended Klvana’s court appearances, a Los Angeles police officer, a Pacoima woman and a senior industrial engineer for Rockwell International.

The core of Klvana’s support appears to be an organization called “Friends of Klvana.” Home-birth advocates Abraham Entin and Rachel Flug, who founded the group, said it has a mailing list of 500, many of them former Klvana patients.

Deputy Dist. Atty. Brian R. Kelberg, who is prosecuting the case, said he is not surprised that Klvana’s mixed bag of support includes former patients, even parents of several of the dead babies.

“Dr. Klvana has a great bedside manner, which is why he has the approval of so many of his patients,” Kelberg said. “By providing that bedside manner, he has dissuaded them from getting the kind of care they required, as a result of which, we have dead babies.”

Klvana, 47, is awaiting trial on six counts of second-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter, along with numerous other felonies including insurance fraud and perjury.

Unlicensed midwife Delores Doyle, 36, of Montclair, who authorities say worked with him during some deliveries, is facing two counts of second-degree murder and one count of involuntary manslaughter, as well as felony charges of insurance fraud and illegally practicing medicine.

Prosecutors charge that Klvana and Doyle, who practiced out-of-hospital births, should have known they were not skilled enough to handle high-risk deliveries. When bread-and-butter complications arose, Klvana and Doyle mishandled them by, among other things, failing to recommend hospital treatment, the prosecution alleges.

Representing Self

During a court hearing on pretrial motions Thursday, Klvana’s voice broke as he told Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Judith C. Chirlin, “I was trying my whole life to help the people. I didn’t murder any baby.” Klvana is representing himself with the help of two court-appointed advisory lawyers.

Doyle’s lawyer, Maxwell S. Keith, told the judge last week that when Doyle had encountered the complications that later proved fatal, she would summon Klvana or take the pregnant mother to his clinic. “He’s the doctor--she should be entitled to rely on him,” Keith said.

Klvana supporters Entin and Flug have never dealt with Doyle but have believed firmly in Klvana from the day they met him eight years ago, they said. Klvana delivered the couple’s 7-year-old son in the living room of their Granada Hills home without complications.

“It was fantastic,” Flug, 34, said. “It was just amazing to watch the skill that he had in delivering the baby. . . . He had a totally different attitude toward birth. He saw birth as a very natural process. It wasn’t a disease.”

She and Entin, who own and operate a Northridge company that manufactures baby clothes, had heard of Klvana from several midwives and childbirth educators. In addition to wanting to have the baby at home, Flug was uncomfortable with technology such as ultrasound. She wanted to be sure her doctor would not perform a Caesarean section, in which the baby is delivered through surgery, unless absolutely necessary.

Home Births

Flug and Entin believe the charges against Klvana are part of an attack by California authorities upon practitioners of home birth.

“They don’t like doctors who do home birth,” Entin, 43, said of authorities with the state Board of Medical Quality Assurance and the county district attorney’s office. “I believe they went after Klvana as hard as they did because he was vulnerable. . . . He’s just a kind doctor who can’t understand what’s going on.”

Petra Gutierrez, 70, of Pacoima said Klvana treated her high blood pressure at no charge and came all the way from Disneyland to deliver her daughter’s twins five years ago.

“You go to Dr. Klvana and you’re sick, and you tell him you don’t have any money and he’ll still take care of you,” Gutierrez said. “. . . If a baby dies, that’s the way God wants it.”

Entin and Flug raised $20,000 to free Klvana on bond in November, only to lose it in March when Chirlin increased the doctor’s bail from $200,000 to $750,000 after prosecutors presented evidence that Klvana had begun to practice medicine again. Klvana has been in custody since then, and a ruling on requests to lower his and Doyle’s bail is expected Friday. Doyle is being held in lieu of $200,000 bail.

But on that cool November night when Klvana walked out of County Jail, he was met by his wife, Svata, and two new friends: Emory and his wife, Harriet.

Emory, 67, had become interested in Klvana’s plight after reading a newspaper story about it, he said.

“It sounded so much like what they did to me,” Emory said in an interview at his Lakeview Terrace home. “I believe he was very unjustly arrested.”

In 1976, authorities attributed 25 infant deaths to the Emorys, charging Joseph with 17 counts of second-degree murder and Harriet with 16. They said most of the couple’s patients were Mexican immigrants who were poor and vulnerable. A judge found Emory guilty of manslaughter in three infant deaths and his wife guilty of four counts of conspiracy.

Emory was sentenced to 3 to 30 years in prison. His wife was sentenced to 2 to 6 years.

His As the Emorys gave the Klvanas a ride home from jail in November, they got to talking, Emory said.

Discussion of Strategy

“We talked about our strategy to show how wrong this situation was,” Emory said. “He said . . . he would listen to what I had to say, and what I went through, and that I would guide him through this ordeal. He made a remark that I would be his mentor.”

In December, the Emorys attended a party for Klvana at the Santa Clarita Valley home of Los Angeles Police Officer Leona Thomas, a Friends of Klvana member. Thomas could not be reached for comment.

Emory said he told Klvana “he was a fool to even play around” with practicing medicine while on bail. But Emory attended a continuing education seminar with Klvana on trauma surgery at Huntington Memorial Hospital in February. At the hospital, Klvana seemed comfortable and unworried about his criminal case.

“He’d walk up to the doctor’s lounge like he belongs there,” Emory said. Klvana would “go in and sit down and act like he’s at home, fill up his plate with food,” he said.

The seminar brightened Emory’s spirits too.

“I enjoyed being with the doctors,” he said. “Doctors would ask me, ‘Don’t I know you from somewhere?’ ” He smiled. “I didn’t tell them my problems.”

In the end, Emory said, Klvana ignored his mentor’s advice about not practicing medicine. Officials sent an undercover investigator to pose as a patient; the defense answered with the testimony of Emory and others about Klvana’s interest in real estate, not medicine.

One of the witnesses was Iva Trojan, who, like Klvana, fled Czechoslovakia after the Warsaw Pact crushed a 1968 liberalization movement in that country. Trojan, an architect and engineer for Rockwell International, attended the party at the Thomas house and arranged for a New Year’s Eve party for the Klvanas.

“I wanted to push them to go out and dance because they needed to live a little bit,” Trojan testified.

At the mention of Emory’s name, Friends of Klvana leaders Entin and Flug frown.

“Probably Emory wasn’t the best witness he could have brought,” Flug said.

Emory said he is not on the mailing list of the Friends of Klvana, who are harder on Douglas, the 83-year-old gadfly who has criticized county government for at least 15 years. Douglas has been instantly recognizable at Klvana’s court hearings by her trademark pink polyester pantsuit and her large plastic badge that reads: “COURT WATCHER.”

Douglas, who says she is head of a 50-member group called Citizens for Court Reform, has filed a malpractice suit against Klvana’s former court-appointed attorney, H. Elizabeth Harris. In March, Douglas wrote a letter to the court asking that Klvana be allowed to represent himself and that Judge Chirlin be removed from the case because of bias.

But the Friends of Klvana group and Klvana’s advisory lawyers believe Douglas’ group has hurt more than it has helped. Douglas appears to be pursuing her own agenda for court reform, they said.

Indeed, Douglas doesn’t seem to care much about Klvana’s innocence or guilt.

“There’s no doubt that he committed many wrongdoings there, in his mishandling or his handling of the newborn deaths,” she said in an interview. “There’s no doubt of that.”

Damage to Case

While admitting that Douglas is dedicated, Flug said, “In the court’s eyes, her association has tainted” Klvana.

“All it does is hurt,” Richard A. Leonard, one of Klvana’s two advisory lawyers, said of Douglas’ involvement.

Friends of Klvana, on the other hand, “always had Dr. Klvana’s best interest at heart,” said Rita-Jane Baird, Klvana’s other advisory attorney.

Klvana was unavailable for an interview last week, but on Thursday in court he referred to his supporters. “We survived basically the last year from the support of the friends,” he said.

Kelberg, the prosecutor who at times has called courtroom observers “the peanut gallery,” sees their interests as misguided. The case is not about the benefits or ills of home birth at all, he said, and many former Klvana patients who believe otherwise experienced problem-free deliveries. They “may be well-intentioned people who have lost the ability to objectively assess” Klvana, Kelberg said. “Even he couldn’t botch a low-risk delivery.”

But Flug says members of her group have thought hard about the deaths and about the risks involved in home birth.

“It’s not just that we have a different philosophy about births than the hospital,” she said. “We have a different philosophy about death. We can accept it. And so can Dr. Klvana.”